Following a career in commercial illustration (for advertising, magazines and US stamps -- as well as stamps for other countries), ​American illustrator Dean Ellis ​(1920-2009) ​ became a prominent name in sci-fi artwork throughout the '60s and '70s.

​Ellis fell into ​this field almost by accident..​. After he'd done some covers in other fields for Bantam Books he was asked by them to produce a set of covers for their early-1960s New Bantam Edition reissues of the works of Ray Bradbury; these covers, featuring in the foreground a straightforward facial portrait of Bradbury with fantasticated shenanigans behind, were very distinctive, and led to Ellis being offered science-fiction​ commissions by other publishers.

From the early 1960s through the early 1980s he produced scores of sf covers​… ​Although in his commercial work as a whole he used a wide variety of media, for his covers he tended to use acrylics and/or gouache, sometimes acrylics touched up in oils.